Optimal Motion Primitives for Multi-UAV Convoy Protection

(c) 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/ROBOT.2010.5509221In this paper we study the problem of controlling a number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide convoy protection to a group of ground vehicles. The UAVs are modeled as Dubins vehicles flying at a constant altitude with bounded turning radius. This paper first presents time-optimal paths for providing convoy protection to static ground vehicles. Then this paper addresses paths and control strategies to provide convoy protection to ground vehicles moving on a straight line. Minimum numbers of UAVs required to provide perpetual convoy protection for both cases are derived